PYSANKY

Before I forget, here are some of my articles on pysanky, those gems of Ukrainian folk art.  There are some earlier articles, too, but I still need to extract them from earlier files.  

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1999/149921.shtml

Tracz,  Orysia Paszczak.  “A Pysanka Mystery Almost Solved”  Ukrainian Weekly  April 27, 2008: 7      A discussion of the (unacknowledged) influence of Zenon Elyjiw’s work on Erast Binyashevsky’s book about traditional Ukrainian pysanky.

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2001/160119.shtml

http://www.artukraine.com/old/egg/pysankaex.htm    

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2000/180013.shtml

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1997/179721.shtml   (part 1)   [still nee to finish the translation of this one!   Oy!]

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2005/510523.shtml

http://www.artukraine.com/egg/pysankareq.htm

and more info on pysanky here:

 

http://www.pysanky.info/BOOKS/Bibliography.html

 

MORE ABOUT VERBA/LOZA/BAZ'KA -- THE PUSSY WILLOW FOR UKRAINIAN PALM SUNDAY

From The Ukrainian Weekly, April 4, 2010   (If you don't subscribe to it yet -- do so!  http://www.ukrweekly.com/   )

WATCH THE WHACKING WILLOWS… AND OTHER STRANGE THINGS

Orysia Paszczak Tracz

The man ahead of me in line to receive the loza on Kvitna Nedilia (Flower, or Palm Sunday) looked bewildered.  He got the myrovannia (anointing with oil on the forehead), and his fat pussy willow branch, and as he was headed towards the exit, watched the members of the congregation hitting each other (gently, of course) with the branches, and smiling and reciting something.  The people who already received the branches even went back through the pews to gently hit the ones who were still waiting in line.  Then I did it to him, and he was really confused.  He had no idea what was going on!  I explained to him that this was a special ritual for Ukrainian Palm Sunday, and that it meant that Easter and spring were coming, and also meant a wish for health.  He smiled and thanked me for the information, saying that now he understood.  The man was clearly not Ukrainian, but loves the service, the singing, and the rituals, and comes every Sunday.  I’m not sure what he’ll think about people bringing baskets of food to church on Easter.

He is not the first person to be confused and confounded about our old but new ways.  There really is an explanation for all this.  What is admirable and amazing is that these rituals, well modified to suit the present, are still carried out at all.

In the olden days, we had Ukrainians sleeping on the stove/oven – ok, the pich (peech) – an appliance/piece of furniture pretty difficult to explain in English.  Then you have young folks dumping pails of water on each other on the second day of Easter (nowadays, the SuperSoaker works so much better). At Midsummer’s Night (Kupalo to us) they also jump over bonfires, alone or holding hands with a significant other.  On special feast days, rolling around in the early morning dew in your birthday suit was also very common and beneficial.  The jumping over bonfires at Kupalo is no longer birthday-suit-obligatory, as it used to be extremely long ago [that wouldn’t go over too well with the camp uprava, eh?].  Of course, in the weeks after Easter, there will be services, and food and drink in the cemeteries, on the graves of the departed.  This is reminiscent of El Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead, the honoring of ancestors also from time immemorial.   And I am sure many of us still follow our mother’s ritual of burying the eggshells and other remnants of the Easter breakfast deep in the garden.  With composting being so popular now, we’re really “with it” – but then, we’ve always been, right?

  

These are all traditions and rituals from our ancient past, from pre-Christian times.  They each had particular reasons, purposes, and symbolism for the actions.  The power of traditions has kept them alive through all the persecution and hardship of our people through the centuries.  The fact that these strange and often not well understood actions are still done so enthusiastically and so willingly by people far-removed by time and place from their ancestral homeland shows how indeed powerful tradition is.  We continue to write our pysanky and bake our paska and babka for Velykden’ [Great Day – a pre-Christian name that survived, and is still the Ukrainian name for Easter].  We sit down to the Easter breakfast and share the slices of the one egg (a symbol of the togetherness of the family) and go to church to watch the hahilky [ritual spring round-dances].  At Christmas, we reverently sit down for the special Sviata Vechera [Holy Supper] of twelve dishes, leaving that empty chair and place setting for our ancestors.  At weddings today, the couple stands on a rushnyk [ritual cloth] and has its hands ceremonially bound with a rushnyk by the priest, and often the “crowns” on the couple’s heads are wreaths of barvinok (periwinkle).  These rituals – and so many more -- are practiced in Canada, the USA, Brazil, the Balkans, other countries in Europe, Australia, the far east of Russia in Zelenyi Klyn, as well as in the homeland itself.  Some of the modifications that have emerged in Ukraine are quaint or even bizarre, but then some of the ones in the other places are pretty strange, too.  But the thought is there, as is the inherent desire to carry out an action that connects us to our distant, very distant ancestors.  We are very rich, indeed.

UKRAINIAN EASTER / VELYKDEN BREADS AND PUSSY WILLOWS

Dear friends, 

Have been behind with my posts.   A dead computer will do that.   Then to get used to the new laptop, and transfer everything and all that......    Hoping to keep up now.   Have to many projects on the go....   I never learn.

For now, here are some of my articles on Easter [Velykden' in Ukrainian - Great Day] from years ago.  This doesn't change.

Will post more later.   How nice that my "Paska and Babka Forever" article is so popular with my readers.

Wonder where the parishes in Winnipeg who celebrate on the new calendar will be getting their pussy willows for today -- still much snow out there!   And then, for the old calendar, the folks may need to travel far north to find them -- may be too warm here in May?

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1997/139718.shtml 

 http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2000/170020.shtml

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2001/140117.shtml

GOING BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM

There is still time to register for this year's specialized tour to Ukraine (August 22-Sept. 8) with me as your "glorious leader" -- as one group named me. 

You can travel on your own (we all become friends and family) or you can bring a friend, relative, or significant other -- or a tribe -- as the Marykuca/Torbiak family did a few years ago.  This is Marvin's travel tale:

http://orysia.blogspot.ca/2012/03/my-good-friend-marvin-marykuca-wrote.html

please check out, and contact Martha:   

 http://www.greatcanadiantravel.com/europe-ukraine-culture-escorted-tour

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BULLYING

It is so terrible, so very wrong, that bullying exists.  At least now there is discussion and action to curtail it, if not to stop it.  Do young kids learn this on their own?  Do they just follow others?  Or do they learn by example from adults?

There is another type of bullying out there -- in the media.  Switching channels, I came across two sad excuses for "entertainment" -- TMZ and The Fashion Police.  Sure, celebrities are in the news and need to be in the news.  It's a vicious circle -- you have to be out there to be current, but you hate to be pursued by the paparazzi and other "reporters."  But you need that photo or article -- but to what degree?  Where is the fine line?

So, the above-mentioned programs (and there may be others that, mercifully, I don't know about) do cover celebrities, but in a most cruel way.  

Fashion Police discusses and disses what celebrities wear.  Yes, many of the outfits are pathetic and wrong, but who are the people dissing them and how qualified are they to do so?  A young woman with lavender/gray hair with too many tattoos all over her body, a plastic-surgeon-stretched foul-mouthed woman who needs to turn the mirror on herself, and the rest of this entourage?  What do they look like?  And they're judging others, with such downright cruel vicious comments?  Watched this once, and wanted to take a shower.

Same with the childish and cruel TMZ -- this gaggle of arrested adolescents, permanently attached to their bottles and cups, not exactly very well groomed themselves, are dissing and mocking others?   If you can't say anything cruel, don't say anything at all?  If this isn't public bullying, I don't know what is.

Yes, some celebrities need to look in the mirror before buying an outfit, and not listen to the supposed stylist who has no taste him/herself, but that's their choice.  

The tabloid journalism in print, on TV, and online feeds on itself and on the cruelty it spouts in mocking and belittling and bullying others.   What a great job!  What a great example to others!   Do you feel good in what you have accomplished?
_____

So today I see this item.  I cannot fathom Lady Gaga.  But there she is, also talking about bullying! 

NOT ALL KOLIADY ARE HAPPY

A koliada/carol from the late 1940/early 1950s from Ukraine -- one we did not hear about openly till after Independence --  not joyfull at all, but tells the story of what it was like in Ukraine just after the war.

MY BONNIE BRAIDS DOLL - FROM ST. NICHOLAS

St. Nicholas - Sviatyi Mykolai has come and gone, in mid-December.  I just remembered I has written this about an early gift I had received waaaay back.






She was the first Christmas gift I remember -- Bonnie Braids, the baby doll with two short yellow braids sticking straight out at either side of the top of her head.  I was about six, and Saint Nicholas, the good bishop, brought her to me during the night of his feast day (according to the Julian calendar).  On the morning of December 19,1951, I awoke and moved my head from side to side, hoping to hear the rustle of paper.  St. Nicholas (Sviatyi Mykolai) always leaves your gift under or near your pillow.  Well, if it was a bicycle or something else really big, it would be near your bed.

My doll did not come in the original box, but in a cradle basket, lying on and covered with pink and blue satin brocade, one colour per side.  There was a ruffled pillow, a thin quilt for a sheet, and then a puffy duvet-like cover.  She was wearing a hand-embroidered flowered nightgown, and had pink ribbons in her braids.  The baby doll was beautiful, and I carried her everywhere, even to school and church.

Although I was not aware of it at the time, Bonnie Braids was the daughter of comics heroes Dick Tracy and Tess Trueheart.  In the early 1950s, this was as complicated as spins-off got.  At the time, I did not read the comics and would not have understood them anyway.  Even though I could read at the age of four, it was Ukrainian, not English, that I knew.  My parents were Ukrainians who had been forced labourers in Germany during World War II.  That is where they met, and where I was born after the war.  An older sister I never knew, Lesia, was born to them during the war, but died of pneumonia at 14 months, and is buried somewhere in southern Germany.  After the war, we lived in the displaced persons (DP) camp in Berchtesgaden, waiting for some country to take us.   Because my parents had been involved in the Ukrainian underground in both Ukraine and Germany, and were fiercely anti-Russian-Communist, there was no way they would return home to the now Soviet Ukraine under Stalin.  After four years in the camp, we arrived as refugees in New York in September 1949, and settled in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Even though my parents knew a number of European languages, English was not one of them.  For young adults, it took quite a while for them to figure out this strange language with no declensions nor articles.  I, on the other hand, was speaking English within two weeks.  Playing with other kids will do that, and soon  I was helping my parents when they shopped.  Our lives were the same as those of the rest of the refugees – no matter what professions or education the people had back home, in America they worked at the most basic jobs until they could pick up the language.  My father worked in a mattress factory, a  bus factory, and a place that made brass horse clocks.  I was fascinated with the one he brought home – a lovely horse on a stand, with a big round clock in his middle.  He would come home with his hands full of cuts from the coils and metal.  My mother cleaned offices across the Hudson River in Manhattan.  He worked during the day, she at night – that was daycare back in the early 1950s.  They greeted each other on the doorstep.  They were also the janitors for the apartment building in which we lived.  Later, Mama worked as a seamstress in sewing factories and bridal shops.  Despite all their hard work, we still had time for church and Ukrainian school and cultural organizations.

Growing up, I was unaware that we were not exactly wealthy.  We had arrived with a trunk filled mostly with books, a down-filled peryna (duvet) from Ukraine, and my grandmother’s big, precious coral necklace.  There was love, warmth, culture, songs, and stories surrounding me. For those first few years, I do not think anything we had was newly-bought.  I was probably about 10 or so before we acquired a brand-new major piece of furniture.  Now that I think back, that original old furniture would fetch a good price on the Antiques Road Show.

One of the first things my parents bought in America was a sewing machine, second-hand.  Mama had learned to sew at home, but involuntarily perfected her sewing during the war, sewing German army uniforms.  Afterwards, in the DP camp, she remade clothing for us from donations received through UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association).  I had some interesting dresses out of men’s suiting, and a beautiful ruffled dyed-pink dress of parachute silk.   As I was growing up, rarely if ever did I have a store-bought outfit.  Mine were all one-of-a-kind, designed and custom-made by Mama.  So it was no wonder that the outfit that Bonnie Braids originally came in the box was just not good enough.

It would be nice to hold Bonnie Braids again.  She is available on eBay, but I do not need her.  I have the memory of her, and the enveloping memory of loving, devoted, very hard-working parents who sacrificed everything so that we could have a new life in a free land.
___

orig. published in    http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2006/020617.shtml